Democrats were thrilled when John Walsh of Montana was appointed to the United States Senate in February. A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state’s National Guard, Mr. Walsh offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.

On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service a main selling point. Still wearing his hair close-cropped, he notes he was targeted for killing by Iraqi militants and says his time in uniform informs his views on a range of issues.

But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.

One of my professors in Law School told us explicitly at the beginning of the semester that there would be 3 major papers over the course of a seminar research class (25+ pages each plus footnotes/endnotes), and that he had written a custom piece of software that, once the paper was scanned, would automatically search the internet for each sentence in the paper. Further, that software was sufficiently fault tolerant that it could find phrasing that was up to approximately 10% variant. He said “don’t plagiarize. I WILL know.”

Anyone caught plagiarizing in the class would be failed. No if’s, and’s or but’s.

It was not an idle threat. There was a student in the semester immediately following mine who was both failed from the class for plagiarism by that professor and disciplined by the College for unethical behavior.

They managed to take a swipe at Rand Paul on the way. But there’s no comparison. There is nothing wrong with copying someone else’s work in an opinion piece, any more than there is in a sermon. When someone submits an opinion piece for publication he makes no claim that it’s original work. He presents it for its content, and its persuasive language, not to claim credit for what a wonderful and original writer he is. The same is true when a preacher gives a sermon; not only is it OK to copy large portions, it’s even OK to deliver someone else’s sermon verbatim, and there are books of sermons published for this purpose! There is no implied claim of originality. An academic paper is very different. The point of the paper is not to persuade anyone of its message, but to demonstrate the author’s talents as a researcher and a writer. For this reason there is an explicit expectation that the work is original. Walsh knew this and violated that expectation, as Biden and MLK did.

By the way, the real Biden plagiarism story was in college, not the Kinnock thing. Once again, there is nothing wrong with a politician’s stump speech lifting lines from some other speaker. Nothing wrong at all. If Biden’s own family history had paralleled Kinnock’s, he’d have been well within his rights to borrow Kinnock’s language to describe it. The problem was not that he borrowed Kinnock’s words, but that he borrowed his history. He didn’t plagiarise, he lied. He told a story about his family that just wasn’t true. That was what sank his presidential campaign.

I think Walsh’s problem here is twofold. One, the amount of plagiarism suggests academic dishonesty rather than academic sloppiness. Two, even if you consider this sloppiness, there is insufficient original content for a grad school term paper, let alone a master’s thesis.